The present invention is in the field of network information services including data gathering and transmission over wired and wireless network connections and pertains more particularly to restructuring of personal data and, in some cases, general data for the purpose of enabling receipt of such data by a variety of connected and portable network appliances without requiring added hardware or software.
The information system known in the art as the Internet, and the Internet subset known as the World Wide Web (WWW), represents the largest publicly available source of information in the world. Anyone with an Internet-capable appliance and an Internet connection can navigate the Internet for the purpose of accessing virtually any type of data that may be held in any one of millions of network-connected servers adapted for the purpose.
The most traditional network appliance used for navigating the Internet and downloading data therefrom is the personal computer (PC). More recently however, a host of other electronic communication devices have been adapted for network connection and navigation on the Internet. Some of these better known devices include cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDA""s), pagers, and notebook and laptop computers. Some types of these appliances access the Internet via wireless connection. In other cases, data from the Internet is transmitted to such devices through a gateway to a network generic to the device. An example would be that of a cellular phone or pager capable of accessing e-mail and other Internet accounts information.
The Internet operates under a shared bandwidth protocol wherein data packets are transmitted whereby each transmission competes with all other current transmissions for available bandwidth resources. The total amount of bandwidth resource available to network appliances accessing the Internet is a function of network traffic, reliability and capability of lines, power of appliance processor, nature of intermediary network, and a host of other variables. It is not always possible to maintain an Internet connection for any reliable length of time considering all of these variables. Sometimes, there are periods when a device simply cannot gain access at all. In other cases physical connection is only possible on a periodic basis, and an appliance is therefore only intermittently connected.
Even with the more powerful and traditional PC""s or notebook computers there may be times when available bandwidth suddenly drops resulting in a disconnect or xe2x80x9cmoofxe2x80x9d as it is often termed. If a moof occurs when attempting to download data, another attempt must be made to reaccess the network, re-navigate to the data source, and attempt a retry of the data download. This can be frustrating for users operating such devices as cell phones, pagers or PDA""s which are already operating on high latency and/or low bandwidth connections.
Administrators of network equipment and connection architecture as well as companies that host such as WEB-based information services and the like are improving aspects of communication with various portable network devices by upgrading lines and equipment, developing better data compression and bandwidth reservation techniques and lobbying for more bandwidth for wireless intermediary networks. However, one area that has been largely overlooked is the very format and structures of data that is transmitted. For example, HTML or XML-scripted content is largely unsuitable for transmission under low bandwidth conditions to small portable devices. As a result, such devices having lower memory and operating under lower bandwidth resources are limited to certain types of data such as only e-mail or voice mail.
A system known to the inventor and listed under the cross-reference to related documents section provides a capability of automated login and navigation to Internet or other network-held sources written in HTML, XML, or other languages for the purpose of retrieving and presenting WEB summaries to subscribers according to client/enterprise directives. This service uses scripted templates prepared by knowledge workers using known site logic to enable navigation, not just to the site, but to specific content posted on the site. A parsing method is then used to identify appropriate data based on the provided script directives.
The data obtained by the above-described method is held in a server for user access (via PC), or pushed to a user (PC or alternate appliance) according to enterprise rules. The data is typically presented in the form of a WEB page made accessible to a user having suitable equipment for retrieving and viewing such pages. However, in another embodiment, the data is re-formatted when possible for transmission to a user specified Internet appliance such as a cell phone, laptop, PDA, etc. The user must first access the service using a device that supports a browser interface. Data is forwarded to alternate devices only on user request and assuming the user has configured his or her alternate device to the service. In order to receive some types of data, special software and/or hardware implementations must be made to the alternate appliances.
The above service does not support independent device access to the Internet (except for devices already capable of browser navigation), nor can it deliver certain content held in a format that is not readily convertible to a format generic to the software running on such alternate devices. Moreover much content that would be convertible may still overload the memory of certain alternate devices such as pagers or cell phones if additional data restructuring and synchronization steps are not taken.
It will be appreciated that there is a growing variety of existing and new portable-type devices that are being adapted for Internet access. Most of these devices communicate according to device-generic protocol and are unable to receive and disseminate certain other types of data under normal circumstance. Furthermore, low bandwidth connection states and limited memory provisions preclude many of these devices from broad Internet navigation capabilities and limit download capability in terms of time and type of data content that may be received.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus for intelligent restructuring of personalized data and, in some cases, generalized data from the Internet into model/device-specific data formats such that it may be easily made available for transmission to and presentation by a variety of known communication devices having either direct or indirect Internet connection capability. Such a method and apparatus would broaden the scope of Internet-sourced data types that a communication device could independently access and receive without requiring hardware or software modifications to such devices.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention a system for retrieving and disseminating information records from Internet sources is provided, comprising a client device; and an intermediary server system including software between the client device and the Internet. The system collects a record specific to a client from an individual one of said Internet sources in a first form in which the record is recorded at the Internet source, transforms the record from the first form to a second form specific to an application other than an Internet browser application, the application executable by the client device, and transmits the transformed record to the client device for display in the application other than an Internet browser application executable by the client device.
In some embodiments the intermediary server system is connected to the Internet by an Internet-compatible link and the client device is connected to the intermediary server system by other than an Internet-compatible link. The other-than-Internet-compatible link may be an Internet Protocol Telephony link, a conventional telephony link operating by a conventional telephony protocol, a wireless cellular telephony link, or a wireless satellite-enhanced link.
In some embodiments there may be a personal computer (PC) connected to the intermediary server system by a conventional Internet-compatible link, and the client device connects to the PC by an other than Internet-compatible link, and wherein the system transmits the transformed record first to the PC which then transmits the transformed record to the client device.
Also in some embodiments the intermediary server system is a subscription system, and maintains client profiles for subscribers to the system, the client profiles including data relative to information destinations on the Internet for a specific client, data records to be retrieved from the destinations, and data forms for transformation of specific records.
In these and other embodiments the intermediary server system may maintain input and output templates for individual clients, the input templates having slots mapping records by type as received from Internet sources, and the output templates having slots mapping data records by type to be transmitted to the client, there being specific correlation between input template slots and output template slots for an individual client. Data forms for transformation to transmit to client devices may include one or more of conventional telephone protocol, Internet protocol telephony Protocol (IPNT), voice mail, e-mail, pager message, and records for applications common to personal digital assistants (PDAs), including one or more of appointment-book data records, memo-pad records, alarm records, and things-to-do records.
In some cases airline reservations retrieved for a client from the Internet are converted into multiple appointment-book entries displayable by an appointment-book application on a PDA, one appointment book entry for each individual flight in a reservation. In these cases there may be an alarm generated for each flight at a time preceding flight time for each flight. A different alarm interval may be used for domestic flights than for International flights.
In some cases billing schedules retrieved for a client may be converted into two or more records, one being a memo pad record detailing the details of the bill, and another being a things-to-do record to remind the client of the time the bill is due. In these cases an alarm record may be entered to generate an alarm prior to the time the bill is due, to remind the client that the bill is due.
There are a number of ways the system architecture might be arranged. In one alternative the intermediary server system is implemented in association with an Internet Service provider site. The intermediate server system may include an aggregation service for aggregating client-specific records prior to transmission to client devices. There may also be a synchronization service for keeping data on client devices synchronized with data from sources on the Internet and from the aggregation service. In one case the synchronization service uses an algorithm enabled to adaptively minimize round trip messages between the intermediary server system and the client device according to whether the client device is more limited by latency or bandwidth. The algorithm in some cases computes Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) codes for input and output records, and computes intersections between CRCs on records on the client device and at the aggregation service, the output of the algorithm being exactly the records that need to be sent to the client device and exactly the list of records that need to be deleted form the client device to keep the data sets in synchronization.
In another aspect of the invention a method for retrieving and disseminating information records from Internet sources is provided, comprising steps of (a) collecting a record in a first data form from an Internet source by an intermediary server system connected to the Internet; (b) transforming the record into a second data form specific to an application other than an Internet browser application, the application executable by a client device connectable to the intermediary server system; and (c) transmitting the transformed record to the client device for display with the client device connected by a data link to the intermediary server system. The method or a variation according to embodiments of the invention may be practiced with and within all of the apparatus and function variations described above.
In various embodiments of the present invention for the first time a server system is provided for retrieving and disseminating Internet-based data specific to individual clients, wherein clients may use devices that do not have or need an Internet connection capability or an Internet browser, but may still very clearly relate to the client all of the mined data, and wherein also the system can keep all data fresh and up-to-date for the client.